John D. MacDonald

Sing a Song of Terror

When the midnight news began, he adjusted the volume without taking his eyes from the highway. He had been driving south for six hours and he was on a fast secondary road in South Carolina, the speedometer at sixty-five.

At that moment the running girl burst into the white cone of headlights, running pale and fleet from right to left, so sickeningly close to the front of the car that his instinctive swerve to the right came after he had missed her flying heels. His mind retained an image of her like a still picture, her motion frozen, with wild fair hair, face half-turned in an endless grimace of terror.

The swerve converted the big swift rental sedan into a tipsy fat man on a narrow sidewalk. The car lurched and screamed from shoulder to shoulder, lights sweeping wildly as he fought with brake and accelerator to kill the pendulum swing of the rear end and lose speed. Just as he began to hope he might come out of it, the back end whipped all the way around, and as it slanted toward the unknown ditch, he fell to his right, covering his head.

After a weightless instant, the left side of the car struck the far side of a deep ditch with a sodden force which slammed him against the left door, dazing him for a moment as the car settled at an acute angle, tipped far to the left.

The engine was dead. Tilted headlights glared into tall weeds “...and in his news conference today the President criticized the...” Pritchard turned the ignition key off. Into the stillness came the night sound of insects, the tick of cooling metal, a gurgling of ditchwater, a stench of scorched rubber. He trembled with reaction, felt a dazed pride at having come out of it alive and unhurt and then began to feel angry and indignant. “Damn’ girl,” he muttered. “Silly damn’ girl.” He cursed her and the depth of the ditch and the time he would lose. He had gone through a small town fifteen minutes back, but he had not noticed the name of it. If there were farms along this road, they were unlighted at this hour. The best bet was to leave the lights on. Their crazy tilt would attract attention. He would get up there on the highway and flag down the first car.

He climbed up and out of the right-hand door with considerable difficulty. When he tried to step from the door frame to the steep bank, he slipped on the mud and slid back down the bank, face down, until he was practically under the car, with ditchwater up to his knees. It made him so furious that he was at last amused at his own anger, and he worked his way toward the front of the car, walking in the ditchwater, toward a place where the bank looked less steep. The night air was warm, fragrant with the country odors of May.

When he was a few feet in front of his headlights, he heard a sound as if two flat, dry boards had been slapped together. There was a simultaneous tug at the sleeve of his lightweight jacket, a clang behind him and the unmistakable treble howl of a ricochet.

Pritchard, without an instant of hesitation, whirled and scrambled with heavy agility up the bank away from the road, away from the lights, dived headlong into tall damp grass and rolled over and over until he came up against what he thought was a small tree until he felt a saggingstrand of barbed wire. He wormed his way under the wire and swiveled around until his head was toward the road and in the partial shelter of the base of the fencepost.

He could not have guessed that old instincts, the old unthinking patterns for survival, could be so quick, so strong, so automatic. He would have thought that all the long years would have hopelessly blurred the animal lessons of the hundred and sixty-one days of combat, the uncounted fire fights and patrols in North Africa and Sicily and up the Italian boot, until Pfc. Dillon Pritchard was 1st Lieutenant Pritchard, second in command of B Company and one of the three original members surviving when the guns stopped. Two wounds and two stars — one bronze and one silver.

Now with the same instinct and reflex which had set him in motion before the sound of ricochet had begun to fade, he knew the rifleman was on the far side of the road and somewhere up the road to his left. He knew his reaction had been good, but there was a heartbreaking difference between the stringy, tireless, battle-tough Dillon Pritchard in his twenties, and the executive weight and softness of Mr. Dillon Pritchard, vice president and sales manager of the Atlantic Industrial Pump Corporation.

The blaze of headlights kept him from acquiring night vision. He listened intently for any sound audible above the drone of insects and burble of ditch-water. He thought of the running girl and reasoned dryly that if they were killing people around here, she could not be blamed for an unwise crossing of the highway. He felt naked and knew he missed the steel helmet over his skull, the weight of grenades on his belt, the clean oily stink of an automatic weapon close to his cheek. He thought, The war is long gone; lieutenant, and you don t have the tools of the trade, and somebody over there is insane.

He turned his head, cupped his hand to conceal the origin of the sound and yelled, “Why did you shoot at me?”

There were three spaced shots. He thought he heard one rip through the grass off to his right. He made professional observations. A moment after the final shot, he heard the unmistakable sound of a slug smacking a tree far behind him. Flat country behind me, he thought, for maybe three hundred yards, and then perhaps some woods. Couldn’t see a muzzle flash because of the headlights. He wasn’t far off target. I’m in that five-degree cone in the line of fire where a rifle has a flatter, sharper sound. Heard that faint greasy snick of a bolt-operated weapon. Probably a sporting arm, thirty caliber. Oh, for one little pistol flare and a grease gun. He isn’t going to talk this over and he can start moving in any moment. Damn maniac!

Suddenly he was conscious of a faraway drone, coming closer. He looked south and saw a reflected glow of headlights against mist. Now, Pritchard thought, things can change. But there were two more spaced shots, and a smash and tinkle of glass as both headlights of the tilted sedan were shot out. But the tail-lights still glowed red against the high grass. He saw the headlights of the approaching truck, moving at high speed. “See my lights!” Pritchard whispered. “Notice the car, boy!” But the big tractor-trailer rig rumbled by, dragging a gale wind that ripped at the grass, leaving a diesel stench on the night air. As he was giving up hope, Pritchard heard the sudden hiss of air brakes, a yelp of tire treads. The rig stopped and then began to move back, whining in reverse gear, moving until it repassed the ditched car. The driver then stopped and moved forward again, easing as far over onto the near shoulder as he dared, stopping with his lights shining on the ditched car.

“HoId it!” Pritchard yelled.

The driver had jumped down and was moving toward the sedan, in the full glare of his own headlights.

“Hit the ditch!” Pritchard yelled, hoping to awaken an old reflex.

The man stopped, peered into the darkness. “Huh? What?”

The two shots were very closely spaced for a bolt-action weapon. The second shot chopped into the fencepost inches from Pritchard’s face. Splinters stung his forehead. He rolled violently away and crawled another dozen feet as quickly and silently as he could, appalled by his own carelessness. In his anxiety to warn the truck driver, he had raised his face above the fringe of grass, giving the rifleman an aiming point — a pale oval in the reflected glow of the truck lights. But the rifleman had made an error in judgment too. He could have used an aimed round on that paleness above the grass and then used the next shot on the exposed truckman. The truck driver had been taken down with the first shot in a way Pritchard had seen before, that sudden boneless sprawl only a high spine shot can create.

Pritchard made himself small and still, trying to accept and control that kind of fear which had been his joyless companion during the hundred and sixty-one days of another life — a cold and greasy shifting and slithering of stomach and bowels. Some explosive action would make it easier to endure, like all the times of counting to ten, then bursting out of cover into that low, lean, swift, zigzag run to the next ditch or hollow or outcropping of rock, every surface nerve tensed for the impact of whirring metal. You would dive into the safe place, and the fear would be less for a little while and then it would come back again as the body realized it was going to be exposed again, its precious softness forced to dodge through a cruel rain.

He thought of Martha and of his two daughters and how Martha would react to a death as senseless as this one. The last time he had been home she had said so wryly, “Girls, this man is your father... Darn it all, darling, why can’t you be home more? Your women miss you so much. We go on your vacations, but you don’t — not any more, not for years. Time isn’t an inexhaustible thing. Dill. These are our good years. And we’re not using them.”

“Next year I won’t have to spend so much time on the road.”

“I heard that said last year — and the year before. Conferences, meetings, surveys, conventions — it just seems to get worse. But — I love you anyway.”

He had seen the hint of tears as she had turned away. There would be tears to spare if this madman killed him — all the tears in the world and a gray regret they had wasted so many of the good years.

He felt a surge of reckless anger, indignation, a sense of outrage. He thought of finding a club, a stone. He pushed the anger back, knowing that anger prejudices survival. The only rational possibility was to move back away from the road, use the old lessons of cover and concealment, and the hard-earned sense of terrain. Use the guile of hunted creatures. Regain night vision, away from the lights. In five hours of darkness even an office-soft man can make a lot of distance. The critical area will be the first couple of hundred yards.

The truck lights were suddenly turned off. He squeezed his eyes shut for long seconds at a time and each time he opened them the world seemed less black. The sky was overcast, but no night is ever totally dark. Slowly he began to make out a row of high trees on the far side of the road and, to the right of them, an angular line of roof. When he heard a nearby scraping sound, he held his breath in order to hear more distinctly and realized it was the scrape of shoes against pavement as the trucker’s body was dragged off the road. He heard a crackle and swash as the body was rolled into the ditch.

And then there was a faraway, oncoming whine of a car coming at high speed, coming from the same direction the truck had come. When he saw the first glow of lights, he shut his eyes tightly. He heard a sudden shriek of tires as the car swerved to avoid the unlighted truck, an indignant yapping of the horn and the sound of reacceleration. He jumped to his feet and ran directly away from the road, zigzagging, a forearm in front of his face to take the shock of any unseen obstruction, his back feeling huge, naked, ice cold.

He ran until his legs could not sustain the violent explosion of energy, then dived, rolled sideways a dozen feet and eeled around until he was facing back the way he had come. He estimated he had made seventy yards. His heart was racing, and he could not entirely silence the labored gasping of his breath. He dug into the soft moist earth under the grass roots and thoroughly smeared his face, his hands and the white V of collar and shirt front not covered by his jacket. The calculated risk had worked. Evidently the madman had looked at the car lights and lost his own night vision. And the sound of the car had masked the sound of flight.

Suddenly there was a thin, quavering cry that prickled the flesh on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. “Gone kill yah!” the man yelled into the whispery, fragrant night. “Gone kill yah!”

Pritchard turned and looked behind him. He seemed to detect a greater darkness which could be a wood lot. He began to move in that direction, worming along on his belly, using elbows, finger tips, knees, toes, staying fiat in a remembered way. He used the trick of vision, learned on night patrols, of opening the eyes wider than normal and trying to focus at an estimated distance rather than at a specific shadow, and sweeping vision back and forth across the limited horizon, knowing it is easier to detect movement out of the corner of the eye than straight ahead.

He saw movement and turned and saw a figure come up over the bank. He saw an angle of gun barrel against a faint luminosity of the sky and heard a twang of wire as the man came over the fence, moving into the field with an ominous boldness.

He walked for a short distance and slopped and listened. He walked again and stopped to listen. Pritchard realized his first plan was no good. He had to keep the man under observation and move only when the man moved. He changed direction and began to worm his way north, moving only when his pursuer moved. The man was ranging west, getting ever farther from the road. Pritchard, by moving north, began to widen the distance between them. When his fingers closed on a round stone almost as large as a baseball, he kept it in his right hand as he crawled.

In a little while he could no longer see the man. He took the risk of crawling continuously and he angled back toward the road, knowing that if he could reach it quickly enough, before the man came circling back, he would take the risk of removing his shoes, getting to his feet and running soundlessly in his stocking feet along the pavement until exhaustion slowed him to a walk.

Suddenly he saw a fence directly in front of him and soon realized he had come to a fenceline that was at right angles to the road. He wriggled under the lowest strand. A barb caught in the fabric of his jacket, and he quietly pulled it free. He was sweating profusely, but he did not dare discard the jacket and expose the whiteness of his shirt.

Ten feet beyond the fence he stopped when he saw another roof line against the sky, on his side of the road, perhaps a hundred feet away. He heard another car coming along the road at high speed and he knew the headlights might shine upon him. He saw a darker area off to his right. He moved quickly toward it and worked his way into a clump of shrubbery. He shut his eyes again. The car whined off into the north. Maybe the driver had noticed the dark bulk of the truck parked half on the opposite shoulder and wondered about it. But he had not been curious enough to stop. Cautiously Pritchard backed out of the shrubbery and moved around the clump, putting it between him and the field.

Several feet behind him pebbles clicked under a careless step. He froze, knowing the hunter had somehow guessed his direction and circled around. He could only hope he blended into the darkness of the tall bushes. He did not breathe. He heard another small sound and turned very slowly, lifting the rock as he did so. He could not risk throwing and missing. He made out a figure in the darkness about twelve feet away.

In the instant he realized the figure was moving away from him, he sprang toward it, covering the distance in two heavy running steps and, as he was striking with the rock, he suddenly knew the figure was female. Perhaps it was a drift of perfume on the night air or a half-heard rustle of a skirt. At the final instant he managed to divert the fatal arc of the stone and let it by from his hand as he bore her to the ground. He fell and heard the insuck of air as she filled her lungs to scream, and he clamped his hand over her mouth. She was agile, flexible and very strong. She writhed and spasmed and raked his face. They fought in silence and at last he was able to lock her legs in his and capture her right wrist and lay with his weight on her left arm.

He put his mouth dose to her ear. Her hair smelled clean and sweet. “There’s a man out there with a gun trying to kill me,” he whispered. “Nod your head if you understand.” She nodded. “He might be close. I couldn’t let you make any noise.” She nodded again. “I skidded into the ditch when a girl ran across the road in front of me. When I got out of the car, he took the first shot at me. Was he after you?” A quick nod. “Did you run in front of me?” Another nod. “If I let go, will you be quiet?” An eager nod.

He released her. They sat up. They were on cropped grass, probably the lawn of the darkened house nearby. She started to whisper, but stopped as they both heard the distant crack of a shot and a quavering yell so far away the words were not distinguishable.

“Now he’s way off by the crick,” the girl said in a thin, trembling voice. “He’s kilt about ever’body. What he did, he—”

“Do you live near here?”

“We’re settin’ in my front yard of where I live, mister.”

“Have you got a phone in there? Is there a gun in there?” he asked, getting up and pulling her to her feet.

She began to weep almost without sound. “They’re all kilt in there. There’s no telephones along here. There’s my pa’s gun. I’m scared to go in there.”

She whimpered as he hurried her toward the house. They went up two steps onto the shallow porch, and there he reassured her, telling her she would be all right with him, that he wouldn’t let go of her hand. The screen-door spring twanged loudly. He moved slowly through the darkness of the house, and she led him to the closet where the gun was kept. They went into the closet, and he pulled the door shut and lighted a match. The girl was about fifteen, he judged. Under the bruises and smudges and scratches was a prettiness, but shock had emptied her eyes. She wore a soiled, tom party dress.

It was enough gun, a heavy old clip-feed, bolt-action Remington, unloaded. She held lighted matches for him while he located the ammunition on a high shelf — a half box and three loaded dips. He snapped a clip into the rifle and put the two others into his pocket. He jacked a round into the chamber.

“Want I should light another, mister?”

“No,” he said and opened the door of the closet, and they moved back to the paler oblong of the front door. Just as they reached the door, the hunter called, much closer, “Lorna Lee! Lorna Lee!”

He felt the girl shudder violently. “Callin’ me,” she whispered. “Out there in the black dark, callin’ to me.”

“You know him?”

“I sure do know that Bert Tallis.”

He moved out onto the porch, pulling her along with him, down the steps and onto the grass beside the path. He sensed she was close to that panic that would send her running wildly into the night again. He put his arm around her rigid body and whispered, “Do as I tell you, or he’ll kill both of us.”

“All right,” she whispered.

“Lie down close to the side of the house, over by the corner of the porch. When you’re there, count to thirty in your head and then start calling him.”

“I’m not goin’ to call to—”

He shook her. “You have to! Do as I tell you!”

She shrugged and gave a small and forlorn sighing sound and moved away toward the side of the house. Pritchard moved fast in a crouching run. He ran to the east-west fence and along the fenceline toward the road. He slid down into the ditch beyond the fence comer and turned and stood crouched, waiting, ready, in the running water. No matter which way Tallis came, he would be outlined against the sky.

When he had almost given up on her, he heard the treble quaver of her voice. “Bert! Bert Tallis!”

“Lorna Lee? Girl, you stay right where you’re at. Don’t you run no more, you hear?” The voice came from the fenced lot, surprisingly close. Pritchard could hear no sound. Then he saw a hint of movement, a noiseless shadow moving closer, taking on definition. Pritchard saw the man would go over or under the side fence not more than fifteen feet from where he waited. Pritchard took aim. At that range it was not necessary to see the sights.

He heard the twang of wire and. from the confusing shape of the image, guessed that Tallis was stepping on the lowest strand and raising the middle one so as to squat low and slip through the fence. As the figure started to straighten, Pritchard yelled, “Drop it, Tallis!”

The man gave a yell of rage and fired wildly in the wrong direction. Pritchard fired, working the bolt quickly. He fired until he emptied the clip. And still the man stood there. With clumsy, sweaty fingers, Pritchard ejected the unfamiliar clip and slipped a new one in place — and emptied it, and waited, his ears ringing. There was a motionlessness about the figure, an unnatural stillness. With the third clip in place and a shell in the chamber, he began to move up out of the ditch. He hesitated when he thought he heard another car approaching, but the night was silent. He moved close to Tallis, then sighed and lighted a match and shook it out. He picked up Tallis’s gun and walked slowly toward the house.

Evidently the first slug had driven the man back against the fence, and he had hooked an arm around a post. The barbs, hooked in his clothing, had kept him upright. The head and chest were smashed.

He called to the girl. “It’s all right, Lorna Lee. It’s all right now. He’s dead.”

She appeared out of the darkness. “Sound like he took a lot of killin’. I hope he had a slow dyin’.” She began to sob.

“Is there a car I can borrow?”

“Pa is the onliest one can start the pickup truck, but over there is Charlie Littrell’s old car he was bringing me home from the dance in. It’s this way, mister.”

He followed her around the side of the house. She gasped, stopped, stood rigidly. He saw the faint form on the lawn and lighted his last match and looked down at a boy curled on his side, his face toward the sky, eyes half open, a hole in the exact center of his forehead.

“We were laughing and all,” the girl said in a dead voice. “Kissed me two times. That there is Charlie.” And then she began a grotesque sound, a hooting and gobbling and gasping. He took her away from the body and rested the guns against the house and took her by the shoulders and shook her until hysteria turned to a dull weeping. He put her in the boy’s car. The key was in the switch. He asked her about the house lights, and she said there was a switch just inside the front door on the right. He put the parking fights on in the car and went back into the house. He found the fights. He walked through the four rooms and he looked at them. He collected two blankets and some kitchen matches and went back outside. He left the house lights on. He did not begin to gag until he was back out in the darkness. Tallis had been methodical. He had got every one of them through the head, regardless of age, sex or size.

He put a blanket over the boy and went and threw the other one over Tallis, finding himself unable to touch the body. He turned away and stood heavily and alone for a few moments, dirty and exhausted, his mind numbed, the night air chilling the sweat on his body, and then walked with a slow sad squelch of soaked shoes, walked on weakened legs to where the girl waited for him, sitting erect and remote in the old car, staring straight ahead. He put the rifles on the back seat and got behind the wheel. He questioned the girl and learned that the nearest town, Durston, was twelve miles south and there was a state-police barracks on the near side of town.

He stopped behind the dark truck, climbed into the cab, fumbled with the knobs until he located the fights and turned them all on, including the flashing red of the directional signals. He found the driver, face down in the ditchwater, illuminated by the red pulsations of the directional signals, and saw there was no purpose in pulling the body up out of the ditch even if he’d the strength left for the task.

When he got back into the car, the girl said in a voice thin and flat that carried above the clatter of the car, “We’d been to Durston, to the dance at the school, Charlie and me.”

He drove through the May night, the headlights weak, the steering loose. “What was it all about?” he demanded with a weary petulance. “Why did it happen?”

“Ever’body jokes about Ben Tallis. He’s back on a sandy road in a shack with a garden patch and runnin’ a still that’s hid off in the piney woods. Not real right in the head since they sent him back from Korea long ago. Two year, since I was thirteen, he’s been coming around saying like he was courtin’ me. Pa has run him off the place time and again, and ever’body bad-mouths him and jokes; but he sets on his heels, starin’ at me from afar off, makin’ my skin crawly like.”

There was a dreamy, singsong quality to her voice. “Last month he found out I was dating with Charlie and he came ravin’ and shoutin’ around, yelling how I was his to marry and he would shoot Charlie dead. Pa run him off for good, saying his Lorna Lee was never to marry any thirty-year-old half-wit man and he should be put away for good and if he come around again, it would be him gets shot, not my Charlie. We made jokes about it.

“Eleven-thirty Charlie got me home, and there was the porch light on, and we started from the car to the porch holding hands. Bert Tallis jumped into the light sudden, with his chin shiny and he shot, and Charlie fell down, and a fight come on inside, and pa is coming to the door, yelling something. And Bert Tallis, he turned and shot right through the screen, and pa fell down, and Bert ran right into the house, and there was yelling and shooting in there, and I started screaming and running through the night, hid in the orchard. All the lights went out. He was calling my name soft, coming closer. I went running across the road in front of a car, to go hide in the thick woods. The car went in the ditch. Then there was more shooting and I snuck to the house, calling soft, but there was no answer, and I couldn’t make myself go inside my own house. Is there anybody... anybody—”

“No, Lorna Lee. There’s nobody left.”

He found the state-police barracks and turned in and stopped. The girl began to rock back and forth, moaning. “It cain’t be a true thing,” she groaned. “It just cain’t be a true thing happenin’.”

Dillon Pritchard phoned his wife at in the morning, before she could near the news reports. Though he made it as simple as he could, he had difficulty getting her lo comprehend what had happened.

“But are you sure you’re all right!” Martha kept asking.

“Yes. Some scratches and bruises. I ruined my clothes and cracked up the rental car, but I’m all right.”

“But, darling, you sound so — so flat.”

“I’m very tired, honey. Bone tired. I had to kill a man. It made me sick-tired. I’ll be all right after I can get some sleep.”

“Will you — want to continue on down to Jacksonville?”

“No. I’m going to call Al at his home and tell him. I’m coming home. I’ll get a flight out of Columbia. They brought my luggage here, and I’ve had a chance to shower and shave.”

“Can you get away soon?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. They’re making up statements for me to sign. And there are reporters here. They’re coming in from all the cities in the area. They keep taking pictures and asking questions. How are the gals?”

“Fine. They’re just getting up.”

“Tell them I’ll be home soon, honey.”

“We’ll all be glad, dear.”

“Martha?”

“Yes, darling?”

He thought of the hundred and sixty-one days of combat and all the limes it had been such a close thing. He thought of vows he had made, of how he had intended to live his life if he could just get through. And he thought of the waste in the past several years. He remembered vaguely, a few lines he had read a long time ago, something about a man being safe from everything except fate and fortune and kings and violent men.

“Dill? Dill?”

“I’m still here, honey. I’m going to tell Al the gypsy days are over. I’ll take no more than four trips a year — short ones.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. And when I get home, I’ll try to tell you why.”

“Darling, you are talking to a very happy woman.”

When he left the office where he had used the phone, the newspaper people closed in on him again. One tall, earnest, persuasive young man cornered him and said. “Mr. Pritchard, the desk wants I should get a sort of action-type shot to go with the story. So I got this gun I borrowed, so how about you come outside with it and you can kinda crouch and look fierce like you were stalking that nut?” He thrust the rifle toward Dillon Pritchard.

Pritchard put his hands behind him. “You have all the pictures you need. I’ve given you all the information you need. I’m not going to clown this up for you.”

They all looked at him. “What did you get decorated for in the war?” one of them asked. Pritchard thought for a few moments and then gave them that quiet reply which was featured by the wire services because it had a special ring of validity.

“For managing to stay alive,” he said gently, “when the odds were against it.”

Content

John D. MacDonald
Sing a Song of Terror